and in their classrooms.
Chapters 2 and 3 show how feminists have called attention to the masculinist, class-stratified cultures in which ancient rhetorics emerged, which helps us approach these texts with greater awareness of whom, and what, they exclude. Feminists have also argued that rhetoric need not be limited to these classical, canonized texts. Instead, they have reclaimed and rewritten the tradition by recovering women’s voices that have been previously overlooked or forgotten. They invite us to ask, what does it mean to locate our origins within the context of a more inclusive, diversified, feminist rhetoric? Chapter 2 features a range of voices feminists have recovered, which changes the sound, purpose, and tradition of rhetoric. Chapter 3 focuses on more contemporary feminist rhetorical projects that move away from a focus on individual voices to celebrate and investigate common themes and tropes across women’s rhetorics, including attention to human diversity, multiplicity of forms, and new rhetorical topoi, or the topics and places from which arguments can be made. Together, these feminist rhetorical contributions open new possibilities for how we teach, learn, and participate in the rhetorical tradition.
In Part 2 of the book, I focus on how feminist compositionists have expanded traditional notions of teacher and student roles, the practices and persona of the researcher, and approaches to academic argument. In each case, feminist compositionists emphasize the importance of how social location and subjectivity—how subjects are situated according to gender, power, race, embodiment, etc.—shape how we know, teach, learn, and write. That is, just as feminist rhetors challenge the idea of universal rhetorical practices or effects, feminist compositionists emphasize that how we experience our world, our communities, our classrooms, depends on our particular location within it; and that location is necessarily shaped by gender, which is always enmeshed with other social categories.
In Chapter 4 I illustrate how feminists in composition have influenced the field’s perception of the teacher and the student. In this chapter, I trace key metaphors for the composition teacher, and subsequent roles for students, which emerge from several pedagogical movements. I then highlight how feminist scholars have complicated these identities, illuminating the gendered assumptions that shape them and making room for more inclusive, expansive notions of teacher and student identities. In so doing, feminists in composition revise the role of service-provider or disciplinarian established in the first origin story.
Chapter 5 depicts a feminist response to the third origin story, which aimed to legitimize the field by associating it with objective, scientific knowledge. Here I trace feminist efforts to challenge the idealized persona in academic writing and settings, which is built upon a scientific model of the objective, logical, rational—that is, masculine—knower. Alternatively, feminist scholars have sought to claim the subjectivity of the writer and researcher, arguing for experience as a vital form of knowledge.
Chapter 6 highlights how feminists in composition have revised conventional expectations about what constitutes academic writing. Even as Composition Studies grew as a field and gained more agency in defining its courses and curriculum, an ongoing pressure remains to prepare students for all of their other courses. In this chapter, I’ll explore how feminists have challenged notions of argument and the unified, monologic voice it privileges, instead advocating for collaboration, inquiry, and for the importance of listening as much as persuading.
While feminist scholarship in Composition and Rhetoric has tended to move in two parallel, though sometimes intersecting, directions—one with a focus on feminist rhetorical texts and practices and one with a focus on writing, pedagogy, and curricula within universities—I highlight throughout the chapters ahead how the two function reciprocally to enhance research, teaching, and writing in Composition and Rhetoric. Indeed, through these contributions, rhetorical and pedagogical, feminists in the field have rewritten the story of composition.
Works Cited
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.
Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition. Champaign, IL: NCTE, 1963. Print.
Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Print.
—. “Overwork/Underpay: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers
Since 1880.” Rhetoric Review 9.1 (1990): 108–26. Print.
Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Print.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.
Douglas, Wallace. “Rhetoric for the Meritocracy.” English in America. Ed. Richard Ohmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. 97–132. Print.
Enos, Theresa. “Gender and Publishing Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition.” Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 558–72. Print.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
Grumet, Madeleine R. Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Print.
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 14.2 (1985): 65–107. Print.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminization of Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201–29. Print.
Jarratt, Susan C. “Introduction.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA, 1998. 1–18. Print.
Knoblauch, C.H., and Lil Brannon. Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1984. Print.
Lunsford, Andrea A. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Print.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Print.
North, Stephen M. “The Death of Paradigm Hope, the End of Paradigm Guilt, and the Future of (Research in) Composition.” Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 194–207. Print.
—. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.
Schell, Eileen. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. Print.
For Further Reading
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.
Crowely, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminization of Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201–29. Print.
Miller, Susan. “The Feminization of Composition.” Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 520–33. Print.
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